The 1-9-90 rule is a rule of thumb governing interaction in collaborative environment: 1% of the participants are creators, 9% are contributors (they comment, like and share things), and 90% lurk. While it is applied mostly to collaboration and networking in digital environments, I was struck by how it also plays out in classrooms. If you click through the slides, you’ll see the same ratio play out over and over.

The instructor (one person) creates the content. Roughly 3-4 students ask and answer questions. The rest of the class? They lurk, probably hoping to just watch it all play out without having to participate.

If this is the natural norm of collaborative environments, this gave me a couple questions to ponder. First, should we even try to shift the norm by mandating more participation by the lurkers? I think that classroom environments are a good place to try to engage students in more active learning. Even if a students’ natural tendency is to lurk, she/he has to learn to participate actively even when it is not desirable (they will have to face an employer eventually that will require this of them). So I think that we should try to increase the participation by the 90%, but just be mindful of this natural social breakdown in collaborative settings (translation: there will be pushback).

The second point to ponder is this: typically online instructors do “force” the lurkers to participate in activities like discussion boards. But often the same instructor will have no such type of participation requirement for a face-to-face classroom. Clearly one reason is the time that would take too much time to let everyone in the class have a say in every discussion, not to mention that the discussion would quite quickly become a lot of rephrasing of what other people said. Oh wait … that is what required online discussions are like. If you teach both online and face-to-face, give this some good thought – I think it is our goal to create the most high-value learning experience we can, and while the environment should impact the design of the experience, be mindful of creating dull experiences just because everyone “has to” participate.